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Concurrent design and engineering in the supply chain are vital to the growing competitiveness of the US automotive industry. However, these innovative design and development processes are hampered if product data cannot be exchanged seamlessly across the supply chain. This paper estimates that imperfect interoperability costs the US automotive industry about $1 billion per year and delays the introduction of new models by at least two months. It also evaluates different methods for alleviating interoperability problems and concludes that emerging technologies and formats offer promising solutions that may lead to significant savings for the industry. Benefits from alleviating interoperability problems can also be realized in other product data exchange‐intensive supply chains like shipbuilding and aerospace.

The recent economic crisis has significantly slowed Slovenia’s recent social and economic progress and exposed some important long-term problems such as a reliance on low value added industries and lagging labor productivity. The Slovenian government has taken steps to create research partnerships between public science and the private sector and among multiple private sector companies. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a social network analysis (SNA) of the research partnerships and examine whether public funding has created the desired partnerships.

The authors employed a SNA in two stages. In the first stage, the authors treated the founding partners of government-funded 32 research centers as a single two-mode network and investigated how each of the members was bound to the network. In the second stage of the analysis the authors used project data from ten of the centers to characterize a project network based on collaborations on specific projects. Thus, the second stage overlaps the center network with the project network. The authors used information from interviews with network members to assist in interpreting the results.

Networking policies are stimulating collaborations among different types of centers and partners, but to differing degrees. While the formal collaborative network showed strong participation from the private sector, public research organizations, and higher education institutions, some of the centers are not well connected to the rest of the network. Partnership in the development of a proposal in response to a tender does not always translate into project collaboration, and the networks have evolved as project workplans and staffing plans are developed. The innovation network is evolving into an international network within and across scientific areas. Networks are path dependent and require policy stability; experienced bridging institutions can fill gaps where partners lack experience.

The definition of a network member is the company, faculty, or department. In reality, individuals within these organizations are acting on their own connections and experiences, and these may or may not encourage other individuals in the same organization to engage in partnerships. Thus, the authors may be overstating the extent to which one connection among organizations generates experience that will lead to future connection. Another important limitation of the data is that for the second stage of the analysis the authors received project information from only ten of the 32 formal center programs examined in the first stage.

Partnership is a learned behavior and the development of trust among partners takes time. The Slovenian government should provide policy stability and allow niches of technical excellence to emerge through consortium proposals. They should monitor the project partnerships and adjust funding so that it is reaching applicants that are actually partnering on projects rather than working alone or within their own institutional types. Other nations should also monitor the impact of partnership programs to ensure that as they evolve the funding is continuing to support and demonstrate the benefits partnership behavior.

Due to the path dependent nature of innovation partnerships, the authors expect participation in innovation networks to generate a change in the culture of research and development (R & D) partnerships in Slovenia. However, this transition will occur faster as organizations partner face-to-face on actual projects. Centrality in a network fosters common understanding and shared principles of collaboration.

Like many nations struggling to emerge from the recession, Slovenia has to examine its long-term strategy for upgrading its industries and improving productivity. This paper demonstrates how policies to enhance the innovation agenda might be more effective by examining how the networking resources are actually being used, whether participants are participating in networks that cross institutional types, whether policies are encouraging the exchange of information across stages of the innovation process, and therefore whether the policy will move the culture toward greater collaboration and R & D effectiveness. The results can assist Slovenia’s policymakers in redesigning innovation network policy.

Sandra Smith is now a patient advocate. Her ‘day in the life’ causes her to reflect on her own experiences of using mental health services and her liberation as a self‐advocate and survivor.

“Where HAS that book been reviewed?” This question seemed to arise daily during my work as Adult Services Consultant for an upstate New York library system. Since I was responsible for the selection of new titles for the system pool collection as well as preparing buying lists for member libraries, I felt the need to have some way of “pulling together” all the reviews for new titles as they appeared in the book review media. It seemed to me that the book review indexes currently being published were inadequate in several ways, especially in the timely listing of current reviews and in the fact that you usually had to know the author's name in order to find citations to the reviews. How did I progress from perceiving a need for a more current listing of citations to book reviews and actually publishing my own index, Title Index of Current Reviews? Initially, several seemingly unrelated events led me in the direction I was eventually to take.

First Edition was set up initially as a pilot scheme in 1992 and has very quickly become an important player in the UK EDI scene. The article describes the background to its establishment and outlines the services provided to subscribers.

The purpose of this study is to describe the development of the 14-item reflective fostering fidelity rating (RFFR), an observational rating system to evaluate model fidelity of group facilitators in the Reflective Fostering Programme (RFP), a mentalisation-based psychoeducation programme to support foster carers. The authors assess usability, dimensionality, inter-rater reliability and discriminative ability of the RFFR.

Eighty video clip extracts documenting 20 RFP sessions were independently rated by four raters using the RFFR. The dimensionality of the RFFR was assessed using principal components analysis. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intra-class correlation coefficient.

The proportion of missing ratings was low at 2.8%. A single principal component summarised over 90% of the variation in ratings for each rater. The inter-rater reliability of individual item ratings was poor-to-moderate, but a summary score had acceptable inter-rater reliability. The authors present evidence that the RFFR can distinguish RFP sessions that differ in treatment fidelity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first investigation and report of the RFFR’s validity in assessing the programme fidelity of the RFP. The paper concludes that the RFFR is an appropriate rating measure for treatment fidelity of the RFP and useful for the purposes of both quality control and supervision.

This paper describes the appropriate uses of Type C interventions and presents three case studies for analysis and discussion. Type C change interventions include counseling, coaching, and consulting. Each intervention involves a service provider who assumes the dual role of “helper” and “change agent”. Each intervention also has unique characteristics that make it particularly suited to affecting different types of changes in organizations.

There is little evidence regarding how to best support the emotional well-being of children in foster care. This paper aims to present the evaluation of an adaptation of the reflective fostering programme, a group-based programme to support foster carers. This study aimed to explore whether a version of the programme, co-delivered by a social work professional and an experienced foster carer, was acceptable and relevant to foster carers and to gather data on programme effectiveness.

In total, 38 foster carers attended the programme and took part in this study. Data was collected regarding carer- and child-focused outcomes at pre-intervention, post-intervention and four-month follow-up. Focus interviews were also conducted to further assess acceptability and relevance for foster carers.

Analysis of quantitative outcome showed statistically significant improvements in all outcomes considered including foster carers stress and carer-defined problems, as well as carer-reported measures of child difficulties. Focus group interviews with foster carers suggested that the programme as co-delivered by a foster carer and a social worker was felt to be relevant and helpful to foster carers.

These results provide a unique contribution to limited understandings of what works for supporting foster carers and the children in their care. Promising evidence is provided for the acceptability and relevance of the revised version of this novel support programme and its effectiveness in terms of carer- and child-related outcome measures. This work paves the way for further necessary impact evaluation.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.